Meltwater from Asia's peaks is much less than previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."

In 2007, the U.N. said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming. Yet four years later, some are advancing. What's retreating is the global warming narrative.

Global warming alarmists felt a tingle in their legs when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report claiming "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of their disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate."

The announcement was enough to set off celebrations by greenshirts everywhere.

Turns out, though, that the claim was nonsense. It was not based on scientific research but on one scientist's guesswork, which was lifted from a telephone interview. It was carelessly — or intentionally? — included in the report.

Despite its mistakes and clear political bias, the IPCC survives.

But its credibility is, at best, shaky — and getting shakier. New research indicates that half of the glaciers in the Himalaya's Karakoram range are advancing. Scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of Potsdam, who cited "erroneous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," strongly suggest that the "settled" science is not so clear.

(Reuters) - Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing despite an overall retreat, according to a study on Sunday that is a step toward understanding how climate change affects vital river flows from China to India.

A blanket of dust and rock debris was apparently shielding some glaciers in the world's highest mountain range from a thaw, a factor omitted from past global warming reports. And varying wind patterns might explain why some were defying a melt.

"Our study shows there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover," scientists at universities in Germany and the United States wrote in the study of 286 glaciers.

The findings underscore that experts in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were wrong to say in a 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 in a headlong thaw. The panel corrected the error in 2010.

The report said that 58 percent of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range of the Himalayas were stable or advancing, perhaps because they were influenced by cool westerly winds than the monsoon from the Indian Ocean.

NEW DELHI: India will push for R K Pachauri to continue as the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while it debates the fifth assessment report at the IPCC meeting in Busan, South Korea thatstarted on Monday. New Delhi will also press for the immediate implementation of all the other reforms that the InterAcademy Council review has sought.

Though the Council had recommended that the "the term of the IPCC Chair should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment", and Pachauri has already headed one such assessment report, which was released in 2007, the Indian government plans to back the director of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) at the meeting.

But, the Indian representatives at the meeting will ask for immediate implementation of all the other reforms of the committee set up after the Himalayan glacier scandal that had dented the IPCC's reputation earlier this year.

THIS newspaper has long been in the sceptical camp when it comes to the great man-made global warming scare.

It is not the warnings of some scientists about the possible impact of climate change that are most objectionable but rather their elevation into an orthodoxy that it is not permissible to challenge.

Yet there has always been the whiff of hyperbole surrounding claims made by the high priests of the climate change
movement.

One of the most alarming predictions was the forecast of Dr Rajendra Pachauri that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, causing an environmental disaster. As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the official United Nations body in this area, Dr Pachauri’s warning commanded massive attention. But now even he admits it was not justified.